Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Out of Print Author Series: Annie Zaidi Edits a Volume of Women's Writing

We are so pleased
and excited that the compilation, Unbound:
2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing that surely bears editor, Ann Zaidi’s
singular approach and fine perspective will be released in a few weeks. Out of Print has pre-ordered its copy of this important volume and looks forward to it.

We asked Annie
some questions about the choices she made when putting the works together, and
she kindly arranged with her publishers, Aleph, to share an excerpt from the
Introduction. But what is even more thrilling, and I believe, important is, she
told us why she chose to use an extract from Salma’s On the Edge that first appeared in translation (translated by N
Kalyan Raman) in Out of Print. Her insights into the story are remarkable, and
we are so pleased to share them here with you.

Although the
excerpt from the Introduction sets a context for her views on Salma’s piece, we
will begin with why she chose to use the work by Salma.

Note on
Salma’s story On The Edge, from which
I picked a short extract for the anthology:

As a student who was scribbling (mostly bad) poetry in
longhand in single-lined notebooks, I was aware that writing – especially in
India, especially writing poetry or literary fiction – was not seen as a real
job. Even very well known writers had day jobs. Some were teachers; some worked
in banks; some were bureaucrats. This was true of both men and women
contemporary writers. Very few of them are what you’d call career writers.

Salma was particularly interesting to me because she didn’t
just have a day job, she was an elected representative of the people. This
meant that she was doing two uncertain, possibly unremunerative jobs, and both
held the potential for internal conflict. A writer must speak her own truth and
that of her people. A politician rarely dares to speak the truth for fear of
alienating her people.

I had read her poems (some of them are available in
translation in Wild Girls, Wicked Words,
edited and translated by Lakshmi Holmström,
Sangam House-Kalachuvadu Press co-publication, 2012). I was aware that she was part
of a brave generation of Tamil poetesses who were being threatened for writing
honestly about feminine experiences and feelings. I had also read her novel The Hour Past Midnight, liked it, and
had almost decided to include an extract from that. But I happened to talk to
Indira Chandrasekhar and told her about this anthology project. Over a cup of
coffee, I asked her about the women writers she has really liked whose work I
ought to read. She mentioned that there was a brilliant short story by Salma
(translated by N Kalyan Raman) that Out
of Print has published.

I looked it up. I read it. Immediately, I loved it. Or
rather, I loved it both immediately and lingeringly. The story gathers up the
threads of multiple aches in a household and weaves them into a long braid of
empathy, intimate detail and gentle humour. It was one of the rare stories I’ve
read about OCD in India, and it was especially interesting to me since our
collective culture has historically made a fetish of purity-pollution norms,
while simultaneously ignoring public hygiene particularly in urban areas. But
the story is also about the vulnerability of women who have no property and no
man to protect them, and how this powerlessness manifests in the form of
obsessive traits or psychological breakdowns. It is also about the ways in
which the simplest joys are taken away from us – men or women – in the name of
morality. One of my favourite passages from the story describes a scene in
which the protagonists are all riding in a car, and one of the characters wants
to listen to a romantic song, but is afraid of being judged for it, and
ultimately, is prevented from listening to it.

This particular story is full of pathos and yet, it appears
to have been written with a light hand. I read it again after a year of reading
several other authors before I decided to approach the writer and translator
for permission to publish an extract for the anthology.

An extract from the introduction to Unbound:
2,000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing:

Editing
this anthology has also been a personal journey. Some books felt like a
personal tryst with truth, philosophy and cultural identity. Some were
bottled-up forebodings, full of cruel prescience. Others infected me with a
grey groping in the midst of bewildering change. Often, I would tweet a few
lines as soon as I had read them. I couldn't wait to share with the world a
tiny fraction of what I had right now!

I
am hoping to convey to you, dear reader, a portion of the joy, the rage, the
comfort, the kinship that I have found. It was only after reading all these
women writers that I was convinced of the need for this anthology, even though other
anthologies already existed. The most significant one is an intensive
two-volume set edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha and I owe them a huge debt
of gratitude. This set included as many women writers as could be established
as authors. Other anthologies have appeared with an emphasis on language,
genre, 'new' voices; voices from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, 'saint'
poets, and so on.

This
anthology does not seek to document all literary contributions by all Indian
women. There are thousands of women writers and it is beyond the scope of a
single volume to include all. I expected to include between eighty and ninety
writers. I have done my best to represent each era and region but limited
myself to existing translations or those forthcoming shortly.

Apart
from the problem of not being able to include all writers, in some cases, it
was all but impossible to firmly establish authorship. The Rig Veda refers to
female rishis like Ghosa, Lopamudra,
and Apala, but scholars do not seem to agree that they authored hymns or
verses. I have heard of women like Bavri Saheb, Sheikh Rangrejin and Taj who
are believed to have written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but
could not find books featuring their original work. It would take several lifetimes
to rescue all the texts that have disappeared from print or have never been
translated.

We
do have access to verses in Prakrit, translated beautifully by Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra in The Absent Traveller,
which resonate powerfully thousands of years later. But while they are written
in a feminine voice, and may have been written by women, there is no way to
establish individual authorship and therefore I have not included them here.
Matters are further complicated by the fact there is a definite tradition of
men writing in the first person, from a female perspective. For the same
reason, I chose not to include folk literature where it is not clear who the
author is.

In
trying to decide what to include, I also examined the question of ‘Indianness’.
Historically, India (Hindustan or Bharat) was an entity that shifted as
kingdoms were won or lost, but it was contained mainly within the subcontinent.
So, of course I have considered all writers who belong to the current map of
India. Partition in 1947 complicates matters but I settled the issue by
including writers who were writing extensively and getting published before
Partition, like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. If they were born before 1947 but most
of their writing was published in independent Pakistan or Bangladesh, I have
left them out.

Many
‘Indian’ writers not only live abroad but were born, bred and educated in other
nations. I cannot settle prickly questions about cultural versus national
identity but I decided to go with some basic rules: I would not privilege
Indian writing in English over other languages, especially where good
translations are available; I would look for our spiritual, cultural,
mythological and political history; I would pick narratives set within India as
far as possible. I have avoided diaspora writing, particularly if it is set in
other nations.

Genres
represented include poetry, drama, novels, short fiction and non-fiction. I
tried to focus on writers whose body of work was not restricted to speeches,
letters or newspaper columns. I also avoided diary extracts. I very reluctantly
excluded the memoirs of Binodini Dasi, Hamsa Wadkar, Protima Bedi—I would urge
readers to read those remarkable works. I grappled with the notion of ‘writer’
for a long while and eventually decided that, at least for the twentieth century,
I ought to focus on writers who created a body of work and not only one memoir.
The exceptions are texts that capture a slice of women’s history at times when
reading and writing was strongly discouraged, if not forbidden, like Rassundari
Devi’s and Ramabai Ranade’s memoirs.

I
read and considered the work of women playwrights where it was available in
English translation but did not include screenplays and narratives about the
making of films. I do believe that film scripts may well be a literary genre of
the future. But I also believe that we must learn to read screenplays without
reference to, without access to, the audio-visual production they lead to. We
should be able to judge them on purely literary grounds, and that time has not
yet come. We can, and do, read scripts written for the stage, regardless of the
productions they resulted in.

Wherever
decisions were difficult, I have weighed in on the side of literary craft and
genre-bending abilities. Another deciding factor was the possession of a distinctive
voice, a definite way of observing the world and remarking upon it. This is
what unites writers as disparate as Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat Chughtai, Irawati
Karve, Nayantara Sahgal, Volga and Suniti Namjoshi. They have all pushed the
boundaries of content and form while offering a fresh feminist perspective.

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Out of Print provides an online platform for writers of short fiction with a connection to the subcontinent. Traditions of story-telling layer our collective contemporary voice. Send us your stories and we’ll send them to the world.